Romesh Gunesekera

“People who read fiction are different from other people because they are people who are interested in an imagined world.”

“Language is the means by which we negotiate our relationship with time.”

“It seems to me that we live in dangerous times all over the world: we have the technology to remember everything but a desire to forget the troubling and to seek the safety of numbness. Fiction can do something about that.”

“I must believe that in words we will find what in fury we cannot.”

“'Commonwealth' is not a word I ever used growing up in Colombo. There, in the late 1950s, it would have meant little more than New Zealand lamb and Anchor butter at the cold stores.”

“Every Sri Lankan, and almost every visitor to Sri Lanka, carries a longing for the place in some small form - hiraeth, the Welsh call it - wherever they go and whatever their background. It binds them however much the war and politics might try to divide them.”

“You might want to write 'War and Peace,' but that might not be who you are. You might be better off with nursery rhymes.”

“I wrote 'The Match,' my cricket novel, between 2002 and 2005. In retrospect, almost an age of innocence in cricket and a time when it was rare to find the game deep in fiction.”

“To come to England in the 1970s was to return to this strange other-world of half-known history. I found the imperial architecture curiously familiar: the post office, the town hall, the botanic gardens.”

“I grew up in Colombo but was lucky enough to spend a lot of time in the countryside as well. Although there was considerable turbulence, even in the 1950s, it did not throw a shadow on my consciousness.”

“To my mind, forgetting is a risky strategy for living. Memory is essential to us. It is DNA. We need to remember, and we need to imagine. That's why we have books, writing, fiction.”

“As a youngster, I think I said I wanted to be a journalist, but that's a disguise for being a writer.”

“When I was growing up, I don't think I knew any other child who had been out of Sri Lanka.”

“I want to keep an inner life alive and, with luck, somebody else's, too.”

“Sure, cricket on a beach on the isle of Jura is different from a Test match in a stadium in Galle, 6000 miles away, despite the sea air.”

“I don't think I knew I would be a writer. I wanted to become a writer, and I tried to write.”

“I was thinking of writers living in East Europe before the Berlin Wall came down. They wrote fantastic stuff but were dealing with a situation that was almost impossible to deal with, but they found a way.”

“My first inkling of what the Commonwealth might really mean came only when I escaped the oddly British-tinged Asia I had known and went to live in the Philippines.”

“With 'Noontide Toll', I wanted to cater to a single story but also collectively more than a single story.”

“I was very lucky - it wasn't a question of being wealthy; my father was just extremely lucky with the couple of jobs he got. So we got a chance to travel when nobody else could travel.”